- Home
- Peter Plagens
Peter Plagens
Articles by Peter Plagens
News
The Celtic Alternative
In any major city these days, you can encounter more neoconceptual artists–and their deceptively artless videos and installations-with-attitude–than you can shake a mahlstick at.
6 min read
News
The ‘Greatest’ Cliche
Critics get paid to make judgments. And I’m fine with that. The most valuable service we critics can provide is starting arguments by saying that, Elizabeth Murray, for instance, is a better painter than Brice Marden.In fact, I wouldn’t mind seeing a sentence like this appear in my favorite art magazine: “After the installation of ‘North, East, South, West,’ his crowd-pleasing series of steel-clad giant geometric holes in the floor at the newly opened DIA:Beacon museum an hour upriver from Manhattan, sculptor and earthworker Michael Heizer jumped to No. 13 in the ATPA (Association of Touring Professional Artists) rankings.” I’d order another beer at Fanelli’s in SoHo and growl to the guy on the stool next to me, “Yeah, well Bruce Nauman will kill ’em next summer on the European circuit.”But we’ve really got to put a stop to this “greatest of his generation” thing.Most critics disguise that phrase as a “fact” of generally held opinion.
6 min read
News
Some Irony With That?
As an artist, Adolf Hitler was a hack watercolorist who nevertheless enjoyed a fairly good overall sense of design. He had a hand in the look of all those dramatic torchlight Nuremberg rallies, Gestapo uniforms and even the original Volkswagen.
2 min read
News
In Defense Of High Art
A few years back, I was driving through a Midwest university town, and I spied an old, oxidized and slightly rusty green Volvo wagon with a gaily colored kiddy seat in the back.The driver was a young guy with a Lincolnesque beard (no moustache), wire-rimmed glasses and a tweed duckbill cap–all of which just about shouted “junior faculty!” As he turned down a leafy, residential street, I could read the bumper sticker identifying his department and his artistic predicament: SERIOUS MUSIC ISN’T AS BAD AS IT SOUNDS.Actually, that’s my artistic predicament, too.
7 min read
News
Froufrous With ‘Tude
Don’t expect to find America’s very best-designed industrial products in the new show at New York’s Cooper-Hewitt design museum: they’ve been dropped on Iraq.
3 min read
News
Viewing The Unthinkable
Talk about timing. Just as Tom Ridge’s “Ready Campaign” of public-service ads is hitting TV screens, a show called “Images From the Atomic Front” has gone up at St.
4 min read
News
Friendship And Rivalry
Squeezed into its MOMA-in-exile headquarters in a rehabilitated Queens, N.Y, factory, the Museum of Modern Art will permit fewer than 4,000 people a day to get a look at its blockbuster exhibition “Matisse Picasso.” That’ll mean a total audience of about 330,000 people–a lot, to be sure, but a whole lot fewer than the half million who saw it late last year in London and the 580,000 who saw it in Paris before it closed there just six weeks ago.
7 min read
News
The Real Leonardo
Do you remember that strange left-handed, long-haired kid in study hall, the one who could do that stupid backward “mirror handwriting” and drew all the time?
3 min read
News
Transition: The Line Kings Exit The Stage
Al Hirschfeld, 99, was to the art of caricature what… Al Hirschfeld was to the art of caricature. The man who showed up at Broadway openings in a long black coat, black hat and Moses-like white beard to sit in the dark and draw was incomparable.
2 min read
News
Art: Staying For A While At A Museum Near You
You might call it “calendar creep.” Art-museum exhibitions in America and abroad are running longer and longer these days. New York’s financially constricted Guggenheim Museum just closed its video show “Moving Pictures” after a run of almost seven months, Scotland’s National Galleries won’t take down its big exhibition of “Warhol to Koons” until it’s been up almost as long and the St.
3 min read
News
The Endless Show
Call it “calendar creep” or simply “slow shows,” but in Europe and America, art-museum exhibitions seem to be running longer and longer these days. The giant Aztec show at the Royal Academy in London, for example, will endure almost as long as that ancient civilization itself; it closes on April 11 after opening way back in November.
4 min read
News
The Blob Strikes Again
According to Dan Cameron, curator at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, no American artist of the past two decades “has treated the transformed cultural interaction of nature and humanity with anything approaching the intensity and depth of Carroll Dunham.” Whoa, some statement!
3 min read
News
A Quilting Bee Bounty
America is a nation of quilters–20 million of them, in fact, which is probably more than the number of people who go to see exhibitions of modern art in museums.
2 min read
News
Flights Of Folly
At the Venetian Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, it’s an amazingly short walk from slot machines to Cezanne. Built right into opposite sides of the Venetian are two Guggenheim museums, both designed by avant-garde Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas and neither yet a year old.
8 min read
News
Hitler: A Gift For Evil–But Not For Art
But why give him the wall space?” an art critic asked Deborah Rothschild, curator at the Williams College Museum of Art in Massachusetts. “Him” is Adolf Hitler, and two of Hitler’s watercolors are in the exhibition “Prelude to a Nightmare: Art, Politics and Hitler’s Early Years in Vienna, 1906-1913” (through Oct. 27).
2 min read
News
Hitler’s Paintings
“But why give him the wall space?” One of the art critics at the exhibition preview asked Deborah Rothschild, curator at the Williams College Museum of Art in Massachusetts. “Him” is none other than Adolf Hitler, and two of Hitler’s watercolors are part of the exhibition “Prelude to a Nightmare: Art, Politics and Hitler’s Early Years in Vienna 1906-1913” (through Oct. 27).
4 min read
News
What Andy Saw
Great artists make the familiar seem astonishing. Really great artists turn around and make the astonishing seem familiar again. In the big, 250-work retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles (up through Aug. 18), Andy Warhol does both–and then some.
6 min read
News
Doubts At Documenta
When a contemporary art extravaganza announces that it’s not limited to art but includes everything from the social sciences to architecture, you know it’s going to be a pretty conventional show.
4 min read
News
Films: Extreme Art House
Peter PlagensThe short answer is: a bunch of nattily dressed 1930s types doing weird, pointless deeds in the Chrysler Building. The long answer includes a destruction derby in the lobby, an art-deco elevator filled to the brim with cement, an intermission and the prosthetic genitals of an entirely new sex.
1 min read
News
Art: Kitsch As Kitsch Can
If there’s anything that scares the pants off the avant-garde art world, it’s kitsch. Plastic statues of saints and garden Pietas, say. Or tropical landscapes spray-painted on the sides of vans.
4 min read
News
Schizophrenic Scribe
Peter Plagens has been NEWSWEEK’s art critic since 1989. Now he’s retiring as a full-time staffer to spend more time in his painting studio. Recently, he sat down with himself-or, rather, his two selves-for a conversation on the vicissitudes of being both an art critic and an artist.Let’s get right to it: how does it feel to be retiring?ARTIST & CRITIC (in unison): I’m not.
8 min read
Load More